On Automatic Data Structure Selection and Code Generation for Sparse Computations

Traditionally restructuring compilers were only able to apply program transformations in order to exploit certain characteristics of the target architecture. Adaptation of data structures was limited to e.g. linearization or transposing of arrays. However, as more complex data structures are required to exploit characteristics of the data operated on, current compiler support appears to be inappropriate. In this paper we present the implementation issues of a restructuring compiler that automatically converts programs operating on dense matrices into sparse code, i.e. after a suited data structure has been selected for every dense matrix that in fact is sparse, the original code is adapted to operate on these data structures. This simpli es the task of the programmer and, in general, enables the compiler to apply more optimizations.